13 French Street by Gil Brewer Read Free Book Online Page B

sealed it in an envelope, and stuck it under the blotter.
    All the time I’d been writing the letter, Petra smiled at me from the hammock with her leg dangling.
    She was right about Verne. If he’d been the way she said, then he’d be certain something had happened if I left now.
    I went over and stood by the front window at the corner of the house and looked at the failing afternoon. It still wasn’t late. A truck went by with some crates of chickens rattling in the back. Then two girls rode by on bicycles with one of them waving her hand and talking loudly. Then two closed cars went by. Then there was a roar and a hot rod fogged past and leaves rushed in wild eddies on the black-top road. As this last one faded away, the countryside seemed unduly quiet, like the sudden stillness after an explosion. The sky was clear and then somebody fired a rifle. The sound rattled around for a few seconds among the hills, then vanished.
    I couldn’t leave now. Outside, the red maple was very bloody.
    All right, then why did Verne act like that, what had she done?
    Cut it out, I told myself. All the excuses keep popping up and all of them are the ones you want because they’ll make you stay. You want to go but you want to stay. You know it’s not the right thing, but you make excuses so it
will
be the right thing. Then when it’s all right, you’ll believe it and your conscience will almost believe it. But not quite.
    I put my hands on the window sill and leaned my forehead against the wooden bottom of the open window. It rattled slightly but it was cool and the pressure was good.
    Once many years ago—many years as the leaves are crisped by time and the price of butter rises and other wars lurk in global focus—once many years ago, in a town in France, there were two men. Verne and Alex. The town was Argentan, wasn’t it?
    Yes. We had stumbled across this bomb-shattered hospital while other bombs burst beyond and around. We were tired of it. There had been nuns there attending the wounded, I could still see all the black cloth and white and the beads. Bloody bandages and a table piled with arms and legs and things and knives and odors. But one ward hadn’t been ruined; it had two walls and part of a ceiling and some iron cots in a double row. The syphilitic ward, it was. Because we were tired, the beds looked good at the time.
    Only we didn’t stay there long, as it kept coming to us what the room had been, was. And whether or not the odor was that, it seemed to be that, and so you didn’t want to stay there long even if you could hardly walk for being tired.
    Verne called as he ran into the ward where I had fallen asleep, “Roll out, man. C’mon. I struck oil!”
    So I dragged myself out of the ward and down the stairs, where I just missed stepping on a hand, and around back of the remains of the hospital.
    “Through here,” Verne said. He climbed through a shell hole in the side of the building and dropped out of sight into blackness. I walked around and into the cellar door, down a dirt embankment, and found him sitting in mud, drinking from his helmet.
    “They missed this one,” he said. “They shot the others full of holes, but they missed this one.”
    There were about eight of them. Barrels that held thousands of gallons. The mud was wine mud, ankle-deep. As he said, they had missed one barrel. Some of the wine was still coming from a couple of the broken barrels, so it hadn’t been long ago.
    I turned the spigot and filled my canteen cup. It was good wine and I said, “This will hold us for a time.” We drank heartily.
    It was red wine. We tried to figure out how they got the barrels down there, but gave up. Either they built the hospital without a wall, then brought in the barrels and sealed the wall, or they dug a cellar, placed the barrels in, and built a hospital around them.
    “It’s better than an emergency dynamo in case the lights fail,” Verne said.
    “Yes. There’d be no need for